About the Editor

Roberto has over 25 years experience in the IT field, and has spent the last 12 years working in the intersection of open source software and business development. Roberto has taken an active interest in different open source projects and organizations, he has served on advisory boards, and helped large IT vendors, open source vendors and customers to design and deploy their open source strategies. After serving as Senior Director of Business Development at SourceForge for over 4 years, in 2016 he started a new company called Business Follows, whose mission is to is to help developers, companies and organizations to make Open Source development a key part of their business strategies. He is the editor of commercial open source blog.

OpenTTT days at CeBIT

From the CeBIT website: “The EU project Open TTT is supporting enterprises in finding, applying and developing the right Open Source Software to fulfill their specific needs. By collaborating with Open TTT the IRC Future Match 2008 has expanded its breadth to include the Open Source Software sector and thus offers a mediation platform for innovative Open Source Software offers and requests.”

In the past event, FutureMatch organized more than 1200 one-to-one meetings between companies, and it is my hope that a significant number of those in the next edition will be for open source services between OSS providers and end-users. I would like to invite any interested company willing to be there to register at the FutureMatch site; please choose “Open TTT” as “Assisting Organisation” during your registration to receive free entrance tickets for the CeBIT 2008.

The OpenTTT project is evaluating a novel approach to help in the OSS adoption process, by “industrializing” the matching process between the demand for software with the necessary functionalities and the offer (the whole set of suitable OSS packages). The mediation process is designed to find the best selection of tools and projects that can best match the expressed needs, and then we try to create one-to-one (or many-to-one, when more than one company is interested in paying for modifications or updates) business exchanges between the potential customers and the OSS-based companies that provide support or services on the selected packages. This approach has been tested in several workshops, held in France, Germany, Italy and Bulgaria and will be refined with the results of the FutureMatch event; we plan to leverage our experience to create a standardized approach to OSS mediation, eventually creating a “blueprint” for competency centers based on the OpenTTT model. Maybe this may be the basis for improving existing marketplaces?

I enjoyed joining the Italian OpenTTT workshop held in Rome on the 14 th of January, as I found appropriate and interesting Carlo’s speech on open source solutions for horizontal and vertical needs needs.

Talking about the audience I was disappointed by the small number of attendees joining the conference, and I spoke about that with Martina Desole (APRE agency).

Martina, who opened the conference talking about APRE’s role and presenting the participation of OpenTTT to Cebit FutureMatch, on the contrary was happy because with 17 attendees they reached the established target (namely at least 4 members for every vertical “club” among Energy&Environment, Industry Production, Transport and Public Administration).

I don’t know how these targets are defined, but I believe that four participants for each vertical segment are not enough to drive conclusions out of mere assumptions. OpenTTT definitely needs a broader audience to verify and test its OSS mediation approach, let’s see if Cebit FutureMatch could help in this respect.

The reason for Martina to be happy can be traced probably to the fact that for traditional matching processes 17 attendees can be considered a good participation 🙂
The project has reached an overall of around 100 companies that were audited, submitted requests, and for which a match was found. In this sense, the number is sufficient to obtain some results, like the fact that there is limited difference in the horizontal requests (across company size and across different countries) and that we were able to match 95% of the requests directly with a single project.
The biggest problem found is that in Italy (less so in Germany and France) the number of interested OSS companies was quite low, and most were not interested in participating in the matching process. I suspect that here we have a confirmation of Roberto (and mine) hypothesis that Italy has a strongly underdeveloped commercialization channel, and for this reason the market itself is still immature. I estimate that we are 2-3 years behind France in this respect, and probably 5 years away from a “well formed” market for OSS companies.

Carlo I believe that the underdeveloped commercialization channel it is a partial answer, since covers only IT firms. In my opinion vertical needs are potentially interesting for a broader audience, resulting in the ideal match for projects like OpenTTT.

In my understanding projects like OpenTTT would need an appropriate budget to promote its events, otherwise technical findings could end to be a tool for (few) geeks.